It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any reader of the Argentus blog that we’re big fans of LinkedIn. Because it’s the biggest, most popular social network for careers, we use it to share our content, to help source candidates, and to keep up-to-date with new jobs that we might have missed. We’ve written about how to use LinkedIn, and whether LinkedIn is in trouble. Suffice it to say, we live and breathe LinkedIn, to the point where the company’s recent redesign feels like when you go back to your parents’ place and they’ve remodelled your own room. It’s undeniably nicer, but a bit of an adjustment.

But! There’s another new change at LinkedIn that we’re already thrilled about – thrilled because we’re salary-hounds who are always looking for new tools to mine the marketplace for data about what people are making: LinkedIn now has salary info!

The new tool is pretty slick. Just go to the site, type in a job title and a location, and it presents you with the median salary for that position, as well as the “bands” of other common salary levels around the median. You have to put in your own salary information to view others’. LinkedIn needs to draw the data from somewhere, and it makes sense because salary data isn’t part of LinkedIn profiles.

Check out the salary bands for Supply Chain managers in Toronto, for example:

But it’s more powerful than that: you can sort salary info based on industry, years of experience, company size, and location level. It will even give you additional compensation – the average bonus you can expect for this position. It will even go ahead and show you median salaries for similar locations so you can see how your city stacks up. At this point, Supply Chain Managers in Ottawa are making more than Supply Chain Managers in Toronto. The fact that you can see this at a glance has the potential to be really useful to recruiters, hiring managers, even students looking at career possibilities.

In short, it’s more powerful than any other salary tool we’ve encountered in a long time.

One advantage of LinkedIn getting into this space is that it can draw on LinkedIn’s 467 million users. It’s a huge wealth of data. And while many results don’t have too much data supporting them yet – the search for “Procurement Manager” in Toronto, for example, gives a salary of $96,000 based on 22 responses – the fact that you can see the number of submissions for each job and area helps you see how much credence to give any given result. We appreciate the transparency. Even if there aren’t enough people submitting their salaries yet to make the median amounts completely scientific, it’s a tool that offers huge potential.

One possible disadvantage is that the salary data is self-reported, although who would put fake salary data into an anonymous survey?

You tell me.       

You can find LinkedIn’s salary comparison tool here.